Christmas in July

The decision to make this based-on-fact saga into a thriller rather than a moral drama may have been arisen from the assumption that the audience wouldn’t know how the story comes out

So let me get this straight. The sleazy boyfriend (Viggo Mortensen) of the stunning sex- goddess Gwyneth Paltrow, an unhappy wife with a hundred million dollars in her butter-and- egg jar, is going to use this desperate woman — as he has used many desperate and lonely women before — to make half a million…

Yet another moral tale to illustrate how much is to be deplored by all right-thinking people the “cycle of violence”

The Lost World: Jurassic Park by Steven Spielberg is virtually indistinguishable from the original of four years ago—and indeed from most other Spielbergian products, particularly in their emphasis on wise or clever or dexterous children rescuing their parents and in their environmental message. Indeed, the most curious thing about the whole film is that it…

Brian De Palma is a talented director, but he really needs to get himself some better writers. Mission to Mars is full of clever ideas, which are too rare in the movies, and spectacular, computer-generated special effects, which are not nearly rare enough, but much of the dialogue is cornball stuff that could have come…

The Protestant Reformation? Eric Till appears not to have heard of it. But of course that doesn’t stop his Martin Luther from being a hero of our time